Worlds in the making: The evolution of the universe

by Svante Arrhenius

If Clausius were right, however, this heat-death, we may object, should already have occurred in the infinitely long space of time that the universe has been in existence. Or we might argue that the world has not yet been in existence sufficiently long, but that, anyhow, it had a beginning. That would contradict the first part of the law of Clausius, that the energy of the universe is constant; for in that case all the energy would have originated in the moment of creation. That is quite inconceivable, and we must hence look for conditions for which the entropy law of Clausius does not hold.

The famous Scotch physicist Clerk-Maxwell has conceived of such a case. Imagine a vessel which is divided by a partition into two halves, both charged with a gas of perfectly uniform temperature. Let the partition be provided with a number of small holes which would not allow more than one gas molecule to pass at a time. In each hole Maxwell places a small, intelligent being (one of his "demons"), which directs all the molecules which enter into the hole, and which have a greater velocity than the mean velocity of all the molecules, to the one side, and which sends to the other side all the molecules of a smaller velocity than the average.[19] All the undesirable molecules the demon bars by means of a little flap. In this way all the molecules of a velocity greater than the average may be collected in the one compartment, and all the molecules of a lesser velocity in the other compartment. In other words, heat—for heat consists in the movements of molecules—will pass from the one constantly cooling side to the other, which is constantly raising its temperature, and which must therefore become warmer than the former.

In this instance heat would therefore pass from a colder to a warmer body, and the entropy would diminish.

Nature, of course, does not know any such intelligent beings. Nevertheless, similar conditions may occur in celestial bodies in the gaseous state. When the molecules of gas in the atmosphere of a celestial body have a sufficient velocity—which in the case of the earth would be 11 km. (7 miles) per second—and when they travel outward into the most extreme strata, they may pass from the range of attraction out into infinite space, after the manner of a comet, which, if endowed with sufficient velocity when near the sun, must escape from the solar system. According to Stoney, it is in this way that the moon has lost its original atmosphere. This loss of gas is certainly imperceptible in the case of our sun and of large planets like the earth. But it may play an important part in the household of the nebulæ, where all the radiation from the hot celestial bodies is stored up, and where, owing to the enormous distances, the restraining force of gravity is exceedingly feeble. Thus the nebulæ will lose their most rapid molecules from their outer portions, and they will therefore be cooling in these outer strata. This loss of heat is compensated by the radiation from the stars. If, now, there were only nebulæ of one kind in the whole universe, those escaped molecules would finally land on some other nebula, heat equilibrium would thus be established between the different nebulæ, and the "heat-death" be realized. But we have already remarked that the nebulæ enclose many immigrated celestial bodies, which are able to condense the gases from their neighborhood, and which thereby assume a higher temperature.

The lost molecules of gases may also stray into the vast atmosphere of these growing stars, and the condensation will then be hastened under a continuous lowering of the entropy. By such processes the clock-work of the universe may be maintained in motion without running down.

About the bodies which have drifted into nebulæ, and about the remnants of new stars which lie inside the nebulæ, the gases will thus collect which had formerly been scattered through the outer portions of the nebula. These gases originate from the explosive compounds which had been stored in the interior of the new stars. Hydrogen and helium are, most likely, the most important of these; for they are the most difficult to be condensed, and can exist in notable quantities at extremely low temperatures, such as must prevail in the outermost portions of the nebulæ, in which gases of other substances would be liquefied. Even if the nebulæ had an absolute temperature of 50° (-223° C.), the vapor of the most volatile of all the metals, mercury, would even in the saturated state be present in such a small quantity that a single gramme would occupy the space of a cube whose side would correspond to about two thousand light-years—that is to say, to 450 times the distance of the earth from the nearest fixed star. One gramme of sodium, likewise a very volatile metal, and of a comparatively high importance in the constitution of the fixed stars, would fill the side of a cube that would be a thousand million times as large. Still more inconceivable numbers result for magnesium and iron, which are very frequent constituents of fixed stars, and which are less volatile than the just-mentioned metals. We thus recognize the strongly selective action of the low temperatures upon all the substances which are less difficult to condense than helium and hydrogen. As we now know that there is another substance in the nebulæ, which has been designated nebulium, and which is characterized by two spectral lines not found in any terrestrial substance, we must conclude that this otherwise unknown element nebulium must be almost as difficult to condense as hydrogen and helium. Its boiling-point will probably lie below 50° absolute, like that of those gases.

That hydrogen and helium, together with nebulium, alone seem to occur in the vastly extended nebulæ is probably to be ascribed to their low boiling-points. We need not look for any other explanation. The supposition of Lockyer that all the other elements would be transformed into hydrogen and helium at extreme rarefaction is quite unsupported.

In somewhat lower strata of the nebula, where its shape resembles a disk, other not easily condensable substances, such as nitrogen, hydrocarbons of simple composition, carbon monoxide, further, at deeper levels, cyanogen and carbon dioxide, and, near the centre, sodium, magnesium, and even iron may occur in the gaseous state. These less volatile constituents may exist as dust in the outermost strata. This dust would not be revealed to us by the spectroscope. In the strongly developed spiral nebulæ, however, the extreme layers, which seem to hide the central body, appear to be so attenuated that the dust floating in them is not able to obscure the spectrum of the metallic gases. The spectrum of the nebula then resembles a star spectrum, because the deepest strata contain incandescent layers of dust clouds, whose light is sifted by the surrounding masses of gases.

It has been observed that the lines of the different elements are not uniformly distributed in the nebulæ. Thus Campbell observed, for instance, when investigating a small planetary nebula in the neighborhood of the great Orion nebula, that the nebulium had not the same distribution as the hydrogen. The nebulium, which was concentrated in the centre of the nebula, probably has a higher boiling-point than hydrogen, therefore, and occurs in noticeable quantities in the inner, hotter parts of the nebula. Systematic investigations of this kind may help us to a more perfect knowledge of the temperature relations in these peculiar celestial objects.

Ritter and Lane have made some interesting calculations on the equilibrium in a gaseous celestial body of so low a density that the law of gases may be applied to it. That is only permissive for gases or for mixtures of gases whose density does not exceed one-tenth of that of water or one-fourteenth of the actual density of the sun. The pressure in the central portions of such a mass of gas would, of course, be greater than the pressure in the outer portions, just as the pressure rises as we penetrate from above downward into our terrestrial atmosphere. If we imagine a mass of the air of our atmosphere transferred one thousand metres higher up, its volume will increase and its temperature will fall by 9.8° C. (18° F.). If there were extremely violent vertical convection currents in the air, its temperature would diminish in this manner with increasing altitude; but internal radiation tends to equalize these temperature differences. The following calculation by Schuster concerning the conditions of a mass of gas of the size of the sun is based on Ritter’s investigation. It has been made under the hypothesis that the thermal properties of this mass of gas are influenced only by the movements in it, and not by radiation. The calculation is applied to a star which has the same mass as the sun (1.9 × 10³³ grammes, or 324,000 times the mass of the earth), and a radius of about ten times that of the sun (10 × 690,000 km.), whose mean density would thus be 1000 times smaller than that of the sun, or 0.0014 times the density of water at 4° C. In the following table the first column gives the distance of a point from the centre of the star as a fraction of its radius; the density (second column) is expressed in the usual scale, water being the unit; pressures are stated in thousands of atmospheres, temperatures in thousands of degrees Centigrade. The temperature will vary proportionately to the molecular weight of the gas of which the star consists; the temperatures, in the fourth column of the table, concern a gas of molecular weight 1—that is to say, hydrogen gas dissociated into atoms, as it will be undoubtedly on the sun and on the star. If the star should consist of iron, we should have to multiply these latter numbers by 56, the molecular weight of iron; the corresponding figures will be found in the fifth column.